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Racism and global war in world politics: As obvious as it is ignored

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Abstract

Contemporaneous theorizing of the Howard School of IR theory on the role of white supremacism in WWI implied a more general relationship between racial imperialism and global war, which we examine in this essay. Taking as its point of departure Rosenau’s (1970) admonition that mainstream IR seemed to ignore issues of racism in world politics even as a ‘surfeit’ of models existed that were applicable to the subject, we attempt to show how the ‘norm against noticing’ racism in IR could’ve been addressed utilizing resources available to Rosenau’s contemporaries more than a half century ago on an issue of major concern to mainstream IR at the time (and today): global war. Our analysis of global wars that were a major focus of mainstream studies of war during the Cold War era (e.g. the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, WWI and WWII) reveals that racism was attendant to these wars with respect to the impact of racial imperialism in each of them. Nevertheless, the relationship between racism and global war has been largely absent in influential studies in IR; and this absence converges not only with the norm against noticing, but calls into question our ability to adequately, much less accurately, account for these wars, in particular, and to build theory that explains important phenomena in IR, more generally.

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Notes

  1. James Rosenau, ‘Race in international politics: A dialogue in five parts’, in Race among nations: A conceptual approach, ed. George Shepherd and Tilden LeMelle (Lexington, MA: DC Heath & Co., 1970), pp. 61-122, p. 64. Rosenau backpedals somewhat in his ‘trialogue’, in a footnote asserting that ‘[i]n Foreign Affairs alone, for example, the reader will find in virtually every issue a couple of articles that probe specific situations in which racial factors are considered to be important’.

  2. Tilden LeMelle, 1972. “Race, international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and the African liberation struggle.” Journal of black studies 3, 1: 95–109, p. 95.

  3. Roxanne Lynn Doty. ‘The bounds of “race” in international relations.’ Millennium 22, 3 (December, 1993): 443–61, p. 445.

  4. Brian Schmidt, The political discourse of anarchy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 75. Paul Reinsch, World politics at the end of the nineteenth century (New York: Macmillan, 1900), 9, 14.

  5. William Olson and A.J.R. Groom, International relations then and now (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 47.

  6. Paul Reinsch, ‘The Negro race and European civilization’, American journal of sociology 11, 2 (1905), 154–156. Robert Vitalis, ‘The noble American science of imperial relations and its laws of race development’, Comparative studies in society and history 52, 4 (2010): 932.

  7. PH Kerr, ‘Political relations between advanced and backward peoples’ in AJ Grant, Arthur Greenwood, JDI Hughes, PH Kerr and FF Urquhart (eds) An introduction to the study of international relations (London: Macmillan, 1916), 142, 163.

  8. Franklin Giddings, ‘Imperialism?’, Political science quarterly 13, 4 (1898), 599–600.

  9. WEB Du Bois, ‘The African roots of war’, Atlantic monthly 115 (May, 1915): 707–14. Alain LeRoy Locke, Race contacts and interracial relations: Lectures on the theory and practice of race, ed. Jeffrey Stewart (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992 [1916]); Ralph Bunche, A world view of race. (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936); Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964 [1944]). John Herz may be an exception insofar as he seems to have developed the security dilemma while he was a professor at Howard.

  10. Robert Vitalis, White world order, black power politics: The birth of American international relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 175.

  11. Ibid., 174.

  12. Robert Vitalis, ‘The graceful and generous liberal gesture: Making racism invisible in American international relations’, Millennium 29, 2 (2000), 335.

  13. Dan Bousfield, Heather L. Johnson and Jean Michel Montsion. ‘Racialized hearts and minds: Emotional labor and affective leadership in the teaching/learning of IR’. International studies perspectives 20, (2019), 173

  14. Randolph Persaud and RBJ Walker ‘Apertura: Race in international relations’, Alternatives 26, 4 (2001), 374

  15. Vitalis, ‘Graceful and generous’, p. 333.

  16. Asale Angel-Ajani ‘A question of dangerous races?’ Punishment & society 5, 4 (2003): 433–448. Alex Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robert Shilliam, eds. Race and racism in international relations. (London: Routledge, 2015). Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, eds. Power, postcolonialism and international relations: Reading race, gender and class. (London: Routledge, 2002). Doty. ‘Bounds of race’. Siba Grovogui. ‘Come to Africa: A hermeneutics of race in international theory.’ Alternatives 26, 4 (2001): 425–48. Errol Henderson, Afrocentrism and world politics: Towards a new paradigm (Westport: Praeger, 1995). John Hobson, The Eurocentric conception of world politics: Western international theory, 1760–2010. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Branwen Gruffydd Jones. “Race in the ontology of international order.” Political Studies 56, 4 (2008): 907–27. Sankaran Krishna. ‘Race, amnesia, and the education of international relations.’ Alternatives 26, 4 (2001): 373–76. Olivia Rutazibwa ‘Studying Agaciro: Moving beyond Wilsonian interventionist knowledge production on Rwanda’, Journal of intervention and statebuilding 8, 4 (2014): 291–302. Aaron Sampson. ‘Tropical anarchy: Waltz, Wendt, and the way we imagine international politics.’ Alternatives 27 (2002): 429–57. Robbie Shilliam, ‘What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the transformation of sovereignty debate’, Review of international studies 32, 3 (2006): 379–400. Vitalis, ‘Graceful and generous’. Idem., Vitalis, ‘Noble American’. Idem., White world order.

  17. On global war, see Jack Levy ‘Theories of general war.’ World politics 37 (April, 1985): 344–74.

  18. The choice of (neo)realism should be obvious given its prominence as a paradigm of IR. Kenneth Waltz. Theory of international politics. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979). Robert Gilpin. War and change in world politics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

  19. Charli Carpenter. “Lost” causes: Agenda vetting in global issue networks and the shaping of human security. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

  20. This is meant only as a shorthand since the war is not the responsibility of any single individual; but if compelled to cite the person ‘most responsible’ for turning the various conflicts into what would become WWII, then that single person undoubtedly would be the German Fuhrer.

  21. Carpenter, ibid., implies that those practicing such tendencies are often gatekeepers in their fields.

  22. Anievas, et al., Race and racism, p. 1. Waltz, Theory.

  23. Du Bois, ‘African roots’, 709.

  24. Ibid., 711.

  25. Theory Talks. Kenneth Neal Waltz: The physiocrat of international society 40 (2011). http://www.theory-talks.org/2011/06/theory-talk-40.html (accessed December, 2, 2021). Waltz’s anachronistic view of African warfare as primitive had been challenged for nearly a half century; see John Thornton. Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800. (London: Routledge, 1999).

  26. See, Gilpin. War and change, pp. 76–77, 93–94. In contrast, AFK Organski, drew on his own model of national development to provide the state level change agent to promote power differentials eventuating in system changing major war in his power transition thesis. See, AFK Organski and Jacek Kugler The war ledger. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

  27. Paul Lauren, Power and prejudice (Boulder: Westview, 1988), p. 4. This is analogous to the process that Ernest Wilson observed with respect to mainstream Political Science neglecting the study of African American politics in his aptly titled 1985 essay ‘Why political scientists don’t study black politics, but historians and sociologists do’. PS: Political science and politics 18 (3): 600–7.

  28. Bruce Russett, Grasping the democratic peace. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 4.

  29. It’s evident among the founders of the US who ‘belonged to a society where the racism was already embedded in the institutions of society, and it was the problem of making sense of those institutions at the same time that the country was declaring its independence in the name of liberty that led eventually to ever more extreme racial doctrines. The theory at the end of the nineteenth century that “the negro is a beast” arises precisely from the premise of human equality as consistently as abolitionism’ Robert Bernasconi, ‘Kant’s third thoughts on race’ in Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta, eds. Reading Kant’s geography. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011), p. 295.

  30. Bernasconi, ‘Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism’ in Julie Ward and Tommy Lott, eds. Philosophers on race: Critical essays. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002) pp. 146–7.

  31. Charles Mills, The racial contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 71.

  32. Immanuel Kant. Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime, translated by John T Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 111.

  33. See, Immanuel Kant Physical geography, Eric Watkins, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 574.

  34. Emmanuel Eze, ‘The color of reason: the idea of “race” in Kant’s anthropology’, pp. 200–241, in Katherine Faull, ed. Anthropology and the German enlightenment (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), p. 227.

  35. Kant, Observations, p. 113.

  36. Ibid., p. 110.

  37. Mills, Racial contract, p. 72. Errol Henderson “Hidden in plain sight: Racism and international relations theory” Cambridge review of international affairs 26, 1 (2013): 71–92.

  38. Modelski’s critique of assertions of Kant’s racism and its contribution to the democratic peace literature reflects the myopia of mainstream IR scholars of global war to even basic aspects of Kant’s oeuvre. See George Modelski, “Democracy and war: The end of an illusion?” (Book review) Perspectives on politics, 1, 3 (Sep., 2003), pp. 644-5. This lacuna extends beyond mainstream IR.

  39. See the selections in Chowdhry and Nair, Power, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, ed. Decolonizing international relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), Anievas et al. Race, Randy Persaud and Alina Sajed, eds. Race, gender, and culture in international relations: Postcolonial perspectives (London: Routledge, 2018); and those reviewed in Bianca Freeman, D.G. Kim, David Lake “Race in international relations: Beyond the ‘norm against noticing’” Annual review of political science 25, 1 (2022): 175-96.

  40. Henderson ‘Hidden’.

  41. Errol Henderson, 2015. African realism? International relations theory and Africa’s wars in the postcolonial era. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

  42. Henderson, ‘Hidden’.

  43. Sampson, “Tropical anarchy”.

  44. Henderson, African realism.

  45. Against a persistent view of antipositivists that experiments cannot be conducted on social history, see J. David Singer, ‘The historical experiment’ Social science history 2, 1 (1977): 1–22.

  46. Levy ‘General war’.

  47. Jeffrey Stewart, ‘Introduction’, in Alain LeRoy Locke, Race contacts and interracial relations: Lectures on the theory and practice of race, ed. Jeffrey Stewart (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992 [1916]), xxvi.

  48. Henderson. ‘Hidden’, 75-6.

  49. Stewart, ‘Introduction’, xxi.

  50. Ibid., xxvii.

  51. Stewart, New Negro, 266.

  52. Ibid., 262.

  53. Vitalis, White world order. Also see W.E.B. Du Bois, The world and Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1987 [1946]); Frank Furedi. The silent war: Imperialism and the changing perception of race. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

  54. In discussing racial imperialism, its useful to remember that race is not a scientific concept as a noun, and it doesn’t become one as an adjective.

  55. Stewart, New Negro, 262.

  56. Locke, Race contacts, 30.

  57. Ibid., 34.

  58. Ibid., 108.

  59. Ibid., 34, 108.

  60. Ibid., 106.

  61. Ibid., 106.

  62. Ibid., 110.

  63. Stewart, New Negro, 262. Stewart is referring to Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. (London: Zed, 1983).

  64. According to Locke, Race contacts, 34, pan-Anglo-Saxonism stimulated ‘counter-movements’ not only among fellow and/or aspiring imperialists, but also among the myriad non-white peoples in their colonies who would organize anti-colonial (counter) movements.

  65. While Stalin was Georgian (i.e. Caucasian), the Soviet regime was largely Russian (i.e. Slavic).

  66. The decade’s research was ushered in by Organski and Kugler’s War ledger; Charles Doran and Wes Parsons, ‘War and the cycle of relative power.’ American political science review 74 (December, 1980): 947–965; and Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to arms (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982).

  67. Gilpin, War and change, Immanuel Wallerstein, The politics of the world-economy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Levy ‘General war’. Manus Midlarsky ‘A hierarchical equilibrium theory of systemic war’ International studies quarterly 30, 1 (March, 1986): 77–105. George Modelski Long cycles in world politics. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987).

  68. Gilpin, ibid., 198.

  69. Wallerstein, ibid., 41–2.

  70. Levy, ibid., 371. Karen Rasler and William Thompson were among the prominent IR scholars at the time to recognize the convergences and divergences in the categorizations of these wars and to test their association with a variety of outcomes in world politics. See, for example, Karen Rasler and William Thompson ‘Global war and major power economic growth.’ American journal of political science 29 (August, 1985): 513–538; Idem. ‘Global wars, public debts, and the long cycle’ World politics 35, 4 (1983): 489–516.

  71. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713) is excluded since it did not involve all the major powers, Levy, ibid., p. 372.

  72. See Waltz, Theory, p. 19; Gilpin, War and change, p. 93.

  73. Immanuel Wallerstein. The capitalist world-economy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 180,

  74. Wallerstein’s broader thesis, like several prominent Marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theses, is subject to the Euro-fetishism critiqued in John Hobson and Alina Sajed. ‘Navigating beyond the Eurofetishist frontier of critical IR theory: Exploring the complex landscapes of non-Western agency’. International studies review 19 (2017): 547–572.

  75. Geoffrey Parker, ed. Cambridge illustrated history of warfare. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 176.

  76. Du Bois, World and Africa, p. 54.

  77. Williams, Capitalism, p. 142.

  78. Harold W. V. Temperley ‘The causes of the War of Jenkins' Ear, 1739’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 3 (1909), pp. 197–236, p. 197.

  79. Gilpin, War and change, pp. 133, 170–172. Also see, pp. 133–35, 138, fn, 13, 140–42, 171.

  80. Gilpin, ibid., p. 128, 170–171.

  81. Parker, History of warfare, pp. 164, 182.

  82. Marshall Smelser, The campaign for the Sugar Islands 1759: A study of amphibious warfare, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), p. 11.

  83. Smelser, ibid., p. 3.

  84. Patrice Louis-René Higonnet ‘The origins of the Seven Years' War Journal of modern history 40, 1 (March 1968): 57- 90, noted that ‘the stakes were high-since the fate of the American empires were thought to hang in the ultimate balance.” p. 77.

  85. Smelser, ibid., p. 4. This banality of war—as well as the imperialist pursuit of war booty—in these ‘old wars’ belies presentist views of ‘new wars’ theorists on the ‘novel’ role of looting in post-Cold War warfare or the greater prevalence of ‘greed’ over ‘grievance’ in recent wars.

  86. Smelser, ibid., pp. 5–6.

  87. Williams, Capitalism, p. 142.

  88. Smelser, Campaign for sugar, p. 6.

  89. This ‘de-racing’ of mercantilism is epitomized in Gilpin’s analysis in War and change in world politics.

  90. Britain devised a ‘global strategy’, which ‘entailed an interlocking pattern: attacks on the French coast, campaigns in America and naval expeditions to India and Africa’ each ‘underpinned by defensive measures’ in Europe in coordination with ‘Britain’s chief ally, Prussia’. Karl Schweizer, England, Prussia, and the Seven Years War: Studies in alliance policies and diplomacy. (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1989), p. 83. For its part, at the outset of the war, France ‘invented an ingenious scheme of coordination in Africa, the West Indies, and North America’. See Richard Pares, War and trade in the West Indies 1739-1763 (London: Frank Cass, 1963), p. 279.

  91. Williams, Capitalism, p. 108.

  92. Smelser, Campaign for sugar, p. 6.

  93. Smelser, ibid., p. 7. Also see, Pares, War and trade, pp. 179-226.

  94. Smelser, Campaign for sugar, p. 6.

  95. Smelser, ibid., p. 7.

  96. Smelser, ibid., p. 7. British attacks on French West Africa were pursued to ‘consolidate British control of the African slave trade, thus appealing to mercantilist sentiment’. Richard Middleton. The bells of victory: The Pitt-Newcastle ministry and the conduct of the Seven years’ war, 1757–1762. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 85.

  97. Smelser, ibid., p. 7. For Middleton, Bells of victory, p. 211, British ‘operations in the Caribbean were a continuation of the mercantilist belief that the way to strike at France was through her trade’.

  98. Smelser, Campaign for sugar, p. 7. For example, with respect to Martinique, British strategists assumed that ‘by dispossessing the French of this rich sugar island their trade would suffer, their revenue decline and with it their ability to fight’, Middleton, Bells of victory, p. 85.

  99. Smelser, Campaign for sugar, p. 9.

  100. Smelser, ibid., p. 9.

  101. Smelser, ibid., p. 10.

  102. Smelser, ibid., p. 8.

  103. Smelser, ibid., p. 12.

  104. Smelser, ibid., p. 12; Higonnet ‘Seven Years’ War’, p. 89.

  105. The racial diversity on both sides of the war does not suggest race is ‘irrelevant’ to the war as Francis Jennings Empire of fortune: Crowns, colonies, and tribes in the Seven Years War in America. (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 261, contends, even as he refers to atrocities generating ‘undiscriminating race hatred’, p. 196. Chester Hale Sipe. The Indian wars of Pennsylvania, 2nd ed. (Harrisburg, PA: The Telegraph Press, 1931), discusses massacres and atrocities committed by British colonists and indigenous belligerents against each other and their civilian populations across Pennsylvania, alone. The war also occasioned slave revolts in the colonies epitomized in Tacky’s War of 1760 which ‘[i]n its shock to the imperial system’ was unequalled until the rebellions of the nineteenth century. Michael Craton, Testing the chains: Resistance to slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 138.

  106. A recent elucidation of how the Haitian Revolution informs present day analyses of international security and development is provided in Robbie Shilliam, ‘What the Haitian Revolution might tell us about development, security, and the politics of race’, Comparative studies in society and history 50, 3 (July, 2008): 778–808.

  107. CLR James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), p. 116.

  108. Leclerc’s perfidy allowed him to capture Toussaint who was starved to death in a French prison. Rochambeau’s depravity was evident in his attempt to suppress the revolt. At their direction ‘[t]he French burned alive, hanged, drowned, tortured and started again their old habit of burying blacks up to the neck near nests of insects’. They asphyxiated blacks in the holds of ships using the fumes of burning sulfur. Rochambeau ‘brought 1500 dogs to hunt down the blacks’ and eat them alive. See, James Black Jacobins, 360, 359.

  109. On the revolution’s influence on the Caribbean and the Americas, see James, ibid., 391–418.

  110. See Dubois, World and Africa.

  111. Iris Chang. The Rape of Nanking: The forgotten holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Sheldon Harris. Factories of death: Japanese biological warfare 1932–45 and the American cover-up (New York: Routledge, 1994).

  112. On Japanese racism in WWII, see John Dower. War without mercy: Race and power in the Pacific war (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). For a counter view, see Akira Iriye. Power and culture: The Japanese-American war, 1941–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

  113. Robert Keohane, After hegemony: Cooperation and discord in the world political economy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

  114. Henderson ‘Hidden’.

  115. Smelser, Campaign for sugar, p. 9.

  116. Waltz, Theory. Gilpin, War and change, Organski and Kugler, War ledger, Doran and Parsons, ‘War and power’, Wallerstein, World-economy, Levy ‘General war’, Midlarsky ‘Hierarchical’, Modelski, Long cycles. As noted above, Wallerstein comes closest to an exception.

  117. Recently, several mainstream studies have centered issues of race and racism in the analysis of alliance-making in the WWI era and Japanese revisionism prior to WWII. See Srdjan Vucetic, ‘A racialized peace? How Britain and the US made their relationship special’, Foreign policy analysis 7 (2011), 403–21; Zoltan Buzas, ‘The color of threat: Race, threat perception, and the demise of the Anglo-Japanese alliance (1902–1923)’, Security studies, 22: 4 (2013), 573–606; Steven Ward, ‘Race, status, and Japanese revisionism in the early 1930s’, Security studies, 22: 4 (2013), 607–639. Beyond international security, an exemplary quantitative analysis of racism and immigration drawing richly on Howard School theorists such as Alain Locke is Andrew Rosenberg, Undesirable immigrants: Why racism persists in international migration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022).

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Henderson, E.A. Racism and global war in world politics: As obvious as it is ignored. Int Polit 61, 413–442 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00532-x

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